The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 Read online

  In this photo, the man and the woman were posed in precisely the same positions that Julie and Mike had been in only moments before. The woman with the faded blond hair stood at the kitchen counter chopping radishes, while the wiry, pale-skinned man rummaged through the fridge for a head of lettuce that wasn’t there.

  Mike told me they moved out after that—sold the house at a big loss and were currently renting a tiny apartment across town. Mike and I used to be pretty close, but I wasn’t sure what to say to him, how to react to all that, so I wished him good luck and said we should get together for dinner sometime. Like I said, this was about a month ago when he told me all this.

  I’ve since heard that Mike and Julie are splitting up. Apparently she’s already moved back in with her parents on the other side of the country and is filing for a divorce. Mike is living by himself in their little apartment and not talking to anybody. Not that I blame him—there are rumors floating around that Mike sent Julie to the hospital a couple of weeks ago with a broken nose and three cracked ribs, that this wasn’t the first time, that maybe this kind of thing went on during their entire marriage. I’ve tried calling him several times, I’ve even stopped by his apartment once or twice, but he’s never home and he doesn’t return my calls.

  Best American Apocryphal Discussion Between Our Nation’s Founding Fathers

  TEDDY WAYNE

  FROM The New Yorker

  This year, the United States’ attention turned once again toward the debate surrounding gun control. Some argued that stricter gun control legislation would prevent gun violence, while others insisted that new legislation would impinge on Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms. Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil, wrote the following piece in response to the latter argument.

  Second Thoughts

  The NRA is not going to let people lose the Second Amendment in this country.

  —NRA chief Wayne LaPierre

  THOMAS JEFFERSON: Gentlemen, a thought has occurred to me regarding the Second Amendment.

  JAMES MADISON: Fine amendment.

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON: Superb amendment. Can’t believe we left that out of the first draft.

  JEFFERSON: Yes, my fellow land-owning framers, but are we perhaps not forward-thinking enough? What if, perchance, we someday develop a rifle that, instead of firing one bullet per sixty ticks of the clock’s second hand, has the inverse effect—unloading sixty rounds per second through the power of machinery? Might it not fall into the hands of a town madman?

  MADISON: Should such a potent “machinery gun” ever come into being and somehow not exceed the cost of an entire militia, a town madman would be refused sale from any responsible merchant because of his agitated demeanor.

  HAMILTON: Hear, hear. Let us repair to the drawing room for a spirited game of dice. Who will roll the highest tally? Huzzah! Whoop! Fizzing! No more capital divertissement shall ever be created, just as my vernacular exclamations of joy will never become obsolete!

  JEFFERSON: Not to flog a deceased equine, but let us suggest that man, with his infinite intellect, invents a series of machines, interconnected to one another, as if caught in a net, to purchase goods. Could our town madman procure arms more easily through clandestine means by buying them on this “interconnected net”?

  MADISON: Nay, for this hypothetical “interconnected net” would not debase itself as a mercenary marketplace, but instead provide a forum for only the most enlightened minds of the day to comment on scholarly works, and on previous comments, in a virtuous cycle of belletristic discourse. The scenario you envision for the “interconnected net” is as unlikely as its serving as an emporium for free oil paintings of semi-nude portraiture!

  HAMILTON: Moreover, our future physiognomists will surely im prove at identifying those prone to madness, and they will be cured by our finest physicians with advances in leeches. Enough prattle; who desires to trade wigs?

  JEFFERSON: But, two centuries from now, could not the tools of warfare progress so far beyond cavalry that arms will be woefully insufficient defense against a tyrant’s militia, such that guns would simply be inflicted by the citizenry against itself?

  HAMILTON: What, Jefferson, do you expect horses to be attached to some contraption that soars above the ground with the fearsome appendage of a cannon? Somebody send Revere to alert Franklin—he’ll attempt to patent this chimera! William Dunlap shall pen a stage play entitled “Top Rider of a Mechanical Flying Warhorse That Bombards Enemies with Cannonballs”!

  MADISON: Besides, such a firearm you describe would be employed solely by hunters to quintuple their productivity in acquiring healthful red meat along with beaver pelts for the increasingly cold winters.

  HAMILTON: And if there ever arises a need for an association to oversee our nation’s rifles, I am certain it will be led by men like us, our country’s most rational minds making sound arguments based on impeccable logic and selfless empathy.

  MADISON: Remember, Jefferson: muskets don’t kill colonists-turned-Americans; colonists-turned-Americans kill colonists-turned-Americans. If you wish to outlaw anything, it should be something an aggressor can easily and repeatedly employ in a rampage: the lethal bayonet.

  HAMI LTON: Not to mention the violence inspired by the daily broadsheets, children’s wooden blocks, and sonnet cycles. Indeed, only town fools would seek to retroactively amend us. Who, for example, can imagine a civilized state whose disputes are resolved without gentlemen’s duels?

  JEFFERSON: Aye, I suppose you are correct. I am retiring for the night, secure in the knowledge that we have composed an unimpeachable document whose every directive will remain as relevant in the future as it is in 1789. Now, please send for my pipe, filled with our country’s most important crop, which I, like all our yeoman-farmer statesmen, personally grow: glorious hemp. And then have my bed fluffed by that obedient sixteen-year-old girl, Sally.

  Best American Yada Yada Yada

  FROM @seinfeldtoday

  After nine seasons, Seinfeld stopped airing in 1998. This year, TV writer Jack Moore and comedian Josh Gondelman began to tweet new plot ideas for the sitcom that situate its characters in the present day. Within three days of launching, their handle @seinfeldtoday had 130,000 followers. Today it has over 600,000.

  Newman uses Jerry’s photo for his online dating profile. George is disturbed when he learns the song he liked in a cab is by Justin Bieber.

  George’s boss fires him after misconstruing George’s “sympathy like” on a Facebook post about his divorce. “I liked it but I didn’t LIKE it.”

  Kramer starts an offline dating “site.” KRAMER: It’s like online dating . . . but at a place. JERRY: You’re describing a bar! That’s a bar!

  Kramer pioneers an all-carb diet. A female TSA agent laughs at George’s body scan.

  Kramer becomes addicted to kombucha. George tries to sexually harass a co-worker to get fired. Instead she reciprocates his advances.

  Elaine is late to a movie because her new boyfriend (James Wolk) will only get in hybrid cabs. Jerry’s new gf cheats at Words With Friends.

  George goes mad with power after writing some scathing Yelp reviews. Restaurants refuse him service. He makes Jerry bring him meals to go.

  Elaine pretends to live in Brooklyn to date a cute, younger guy. Kramer becomes addicted to 5-Hour Energy. George’s parents get Skype.

  Elaine has a bad waiter at a nice restaurant. Her negative Yelp review goes viral, she gets banned. Kramer accidentally joins the Tea Party.

  Kramer stockpiles honey when he hears that bees are disappearing, ends up on Hoarders. George tries to become a “hat guy,” wears a fedora.

  George “accidentally” sends a “reply all” e-mail in an attempt to get fired. He is promptly promoted for his gutsy attitude.

  Jerry joins Twitter only to find that a Jerry parody account has 50k followers. It’s run by Bania who will stop if Jerry buys him dinner.

  Kramer is under investigation
for heavy torrenting. Jerry’s new girlfriend writes an extremely graphic blog. George discovers Banh Mi.

  Best American Tattoo Stories

  WENDY MACNAUGHTON AND ISAAC FITZGERALD

  FROM penandink.tumblr.com

  In 2012, artist Wendy MacNaughton and writer Isaac Fitzgerald set out to document tattoos and the stories behind them. Fitzgerald is a co-owner of the online magazine TheRumpus.net. MacNaughton is the illustrator of, most recently, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. Their work together will be featured in the book Pen and Ink, which comes out in 2014.

  Best American Comic That Ends in Arson

  LYNDA BARRY

  FROM The Freddie Stories

  Lynda Barry is an American cartoonist and author. She is best known as the creator of the comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek. The following is an excerpt from her latest graphic novel, The Freddie Stories. Throughout the book, Barry takes us inside the mind of Freddie, the youngest child in the Mullen family. In this particular episode, Freddie is accused of a heinous crime he did not commit.

  Best American Story About a Hazardous, Symbolical Cesspool

  PETER ORNER

  FROM The Paris Review

  Peter Orner is a writer and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. His most recent book was Love and Shame and Love. The following short story is a part of his new collection Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge.

  Foley’s Pond

  Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water. This was in 1983. She was two and a half.

  The day Nate came back to school, we refrained from playing Kill the Guy with the Ball at recess. We stood around in a ragged circle on the edge of the basketball court and spoke to each other in polite murmurs. We were a group of guys in junior high who hung out together. It wasn’t like we weren’t capable of understanding. Some of us even had sisters. But instinctively we seemed to get it that our role was not to understand or even to console but, in the spirit of funerals, to act. So we stood there and looked at our shoes and kicked at loose asphalt. Nate went along with it. He played chief mourner by nodding his head slowly. I remember Stu Rothstein finally trying to say something.

  “Look, it’s not like it’s your fault,” Stu said. “I mean how could you have known she knew how to slide under the fence?”

  Nate looked up from his shoes.

  “I taught her.”

  What could anybody say to that? Stu took a stab. He’d always been decent like that.

  “Well, it’s not like you told her to do it when you weren’t looking.”

  “I didn’t?”

  Stu didn’t say anything after that. Nobody else did, either. We let Nate’s question hang there, and to this day I don’t know whether he meant it or whether, out of grief, he was assuming even more guilt than he needed to. Like Stu Rothstein, Nate Zamost was a gentle guy. During Kill the Guy with the Ball, he never went for your head; he’d always go for your ankles and take you down easy. It was the rest of us who were more interested in blood than the ball itself. But who’s to say what goes on behind closed doors, between siblings? Nate, like all of us, was thirteen that year. His parents went out for a couple of hours and left him in charge of his little sister.

  Remembering it all now, what comes to me most vividly is my private anger toward Nate. Foley’s Pond had always been a secret place and now everybody in town knew all about it. It was wedged inside a small patch of woods, between where Bob-O-Link Avenue ended and the public golf course began. The pond was said to have been created by runoff from the golf course, that it was nothing but a cesspool of chemicals. Proof of this theory was embodied by the large, corrugated drainpipe that hung out over the edge of the pond. Whatever it was that flowed from it didn’t look like water. Once, Ross Berger dove into Foley’s and came up with green hair and leeches on his thighs. Someone shouted, “The sludge supports life!” We all jumped in. It was like swimming in crude oil. A fantastic place, Foley’s—scragged, infested, overgrown, and gloomed long before Nate Zamost’s sister wrecked it. How many mob hits, feet tied to bricks, bobbed and swayed at the bottom of that fetid swamp? All the missing kids in Chicago, milk-carton phantom faces, all, all were dumped into Foley’s.

  After school we’d go down there and talk down the waterlogged afternoons. There is something overripe about spring in the Midwest, the wet and green world, the ground itself rotten, oozing, dripping. Foley’s was protected by a canopy of trees. The sun only crept through in speckles. There was nothing beautiful about that pond, even in April, except that it was ours. Foley’s in the rain, the rain smacking the leaves, how hidden we were, talking and talking and talking about God only knows what. Had we been a little older we may have drunk beers or smoked dope or brought girls so they could scream about not wanting to go anywhere near that disgusting water. We were thirteen and conspiratorial and what was said is now out of reach, as it should be.

  It took them eleven hours to find her. Foley’s was a lot deeper than anybody had thought. The fire department’s charts turned out to be inaccurate. Police divers had to come up from Chicago. And something else that by now most people may have forgotten and newcomers would have no way of knowing. When they laid Babs on the grass in the dark, Nate Zamost’s mother refused to acknowledge that the mottle of bloated flesh lit up by high-powered flashlights was her daughter, anybody’s daughter. Mrs. Zamost didn’t know Foley’s. Ross Berger was down there twelve seconds, and he came up looking like an alien. She wouldn’t even touch it. I was there, just outside the ring of lights. Mrs. Zamost didn’t scream, just shook her head, and stepped backward into the dark.

  Foley’s is a real park now. The Park District manicured it. The trees have been trimmed. There’s a wide, wood-chip path off Bob-O-Link that leads right to it. And they’ve installed tall bird feeders, long poles topped with small yellow houses.

  Best American Poem About a Particle Accelerator

  BRENDAN TODT

  FROM Ninth Letter

  One of the scientific highlights of the year was the pursuit of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that could be responsible for all of the mass in the universe. Although it still has not been seen, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland tentatively confirmed its existence in March 2013. The following poem tells the story of a similar but fictional particle accelerator in Siberia.

  At the Particle Accelerator at Krasnoyarsk

  The Belgian physicist sits with the Flemish physicist as the journalist from Denmark writes everything down.

  Inside, the married couples spin by at velocities just shy of the speed of light.

  At any time now, the Belgian explains, one couple will collide with another and shatter into its constituent parts.

  And it all seems simple enough for the journalist who feels obliged to ask what exactly the point is of this kind of science

  when you know you will observe afterward the man and the woman whirling wildly around separately.

  But the Belgian and the Fleming exclaim NoNoNo,

  The man and woman disappear entirely from the eight hundred and forty-two mile accelerator

  and what they have observed and hope to capture are the colorful corpuscles of fury, envy, lust, capriciousness, tenderness, tardiness, punctuality, sexuality, fortitude, temperance, malice, disobedience, loyalty,

  and any of the other quark-sized emoticons that may appear and adhere to the accelerator walls

  chilled nearly to absolute zero eighty-seven stories below ground in Siberia.

  And when it happens, there is no sound, no moan of discomfort or pleasure,

  as the Brazilian couple smashes into the Filipino couple and a red flashing light above the console be
gins flashing and rotating

  and all of the instrumentation goes berserk,

  and the Danish journalist begins writing something down though he understands nothing,

  and he watches on the monitors as the accelerator fills with a gas that was previously explained to him

  to facilitate the condensation of the quark-size emoticons into particles with just enough mass to cause them to drop to the floor

  which is constructed, much like a microscope slide is constructed, so that they can be instantaneously illuminated and documented and studied,